Cairo Time – Egyptian capital as alluring backdrop in a romance film
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Cairo Time, by Montreal-born director Ruba Nadda and winner of the Best Canadian Feature Award at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, is an elegantly understated story of unlikely love.Apart from the splendors of Cairo, the pivot to this picture is magnificent American actress Patricia Clarkson. She is cast as Juliette, an oh-so-reserved, seemingly repressed magazine editor who comes to Cairo to hook up with her husband, a United Nations representative stationed in Gaza. But when his work delays him from their rendezvous, he dispatches Tareq (Alexander Siddig), a friend and former UN colleague to show her around.
Tareq, who now runs a coffee house in the city, knows all the charms of Cairo. Tareq is also unfailingly charming. Happily married though she may be, Juliette can’t resist his Old World charm. She is totally captivated.
Their romance simmers below the surface, threatening to explode but never quite doing so. Which makes the movie all the more enticing. In Hollywood, the couple would have hit the sack five minutes after the opening titles. If this had transpired here, viewers would have been denied breathtaking visuals of Cairo.
Excerpted from an article by Bill Brownstein for The Gazette
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